Fall Directed Study - Week 3

At the beginning of my third week of directed study I took a day off from sculpting my Addict and worked on building my Gallery structure. I built the walls as panels that I could duplicate around the room, but I had a bit of an issue with the curvature of the round room.

If I built the walls at a low resolution as I originally planned, the shape of the room would still be perfectly round everywhere once I welded the panels together and smoothed them except at the windows, where I was forced to put in extra edge loops to fit the window frames into the panels. The portions of the wall with the windows would have lost their perfect roundness and instead become slightly faceted as the extra edge loops held the geometry in place rather than letting it spread out evenly in perfect roundness. I was concerned that if this happened you would see the unevenness in the way the light hit the walls near the windows, even from fairly far away as my renders of the gallery will be.

My other option was to build the walls at a higher resolution, with vertical edge loops holding the definition of the curve all along the length of the wall at the same interval as existed between the edge of each panel and the edge loop defining the position of the window frame. All of the vertical edge loops would still be evenly spaced, and the curve of the wall wouldn't pucker from extra edge loops breaking the rhythm of the curve. The problem with this option is that it seems overkill to have high-res walls. Walls shouldn't have to be high-res: they're flat blank spaces with no detail to speak of. It seems ridiculous to have high resolution walls... In the end, however, I went with the ridiculous. I couldn't bear the thought of modeling the whole beautiful gallery only to be unhappy with the way that it renders because the curvature is slightly off at the windows and causing errant highlights on the otherwise-perfect roundness of my room. (Despite my best efforts, I did end up with extra vertical edge loops around the window frames as necessary holding edges, but you can't even see their influence in the curvature of the walls because the close intervals of the other vertical edge loops across the rest of each wall panel makes their influence so minimal that it's not even visible.)

I spent quite a bit of time building the walls and windows: making the flat glass window panels fit into window frames on curved walls, modeling the trim around the window that holds the glass into place, making sure that the different panel pieces connect correctly... In the end, I wound up with five different window/wall panels to duplicate in various positions around the room: One blank wall piece, one full window piece, one wall piece with trim to finish off a window frame on the right, one wall piece with the trim to finish off a window frame to the left, and one wall with trim to finish window frames on both sides. You see, each window panel ends in the middle of the trim so that, when the windows connect, there's no wall area between them. This, of course, means that when a bank of windows ends the next wall panel needs half the width of trim on the edge to finish off the window next to it. Hence: five panels.

 

The last thing that I did in my gallery was block in the columns and major furnishings. This process actually caused me to resize and slightly reproportion my room when I discovered how little room I had left for the reading nook. The way I see it, your average couch is probably around five feet in length; when I made my couches that long they took up very nearly the entire floor space of the reading nook, leaving no space to actually access the bookshelves. So, I thought again. I moved the five-foot couch place-holders over to the reading nook area of the floor plan, then resized the floor plan image plane to fit them, leaving enough room to walk around and between the couches to navigate the nook area. Then I scaled the walls up evenly to fit the newly resized floor plan. I then scaled the height of the walls back down so that my ceilings weren't ridiculously high. In a room this grand, I do want high ceilings, but not completely, outrageously high. I've decided on an eight inch crown molding at nine feet with the actual ceiling topping out at twelve feet. I've been in houses with nine foot ceilings before and they're really nice, but I think that in a forty-five foot in diameter room (which is what the gallery turned out to be after resizing for the nook) they'd make the space feel just a little bit claustrophobic; so I settled on twelve foot ceilings. I then spaced out place holders for the columns and bookcases surrounding the reading nook, and that was the end of my work for the day.

For the next few days, I finished sculpting my Addict:

 

Tareq had mentioned when I turned in my last week's progress that the character's wrists looked broken: that the hands met the arms at the wrong angle. I worked to remedy that problem, then went on to finish sculpting the face, refining the hands, and sculpting the divisions into the forearm sleeves. Then I exported the 2nd subdivision level character mesh, unfolded the UVs a bit, and baked my normal maps:

 

I was concerned that I was going to get a lot of problem areas in the normal map where the geometry of one part of the body pressed against the geometry of another part in the pose that he's in (i.e.: the fingertips pressing against the face, the back of the thighs pressing against the calves, the inner elbows pressing against themselves), but, surprisingly, I had very few issues. I did end up separating out some pieces of the high- and low-res meshes and re-baking normal maps for certain areas (such as the face) and compositing the new maps into the the full body one, but I didn't have to do this for nearly as many pieces as I expected to: most of the anomalies in the map were able to be fixed with just a bit of healing brush application in Photoshop.

Then I started work on the color map.

The image above took about a day's worth of work to complete - a very full day of work, but a day nonetheless. In this map, nearly all of the precise divisions are done. The shoulder pads and the ears still have to be subdivided according to the information in the normal map, but the rest of the precise linework is done. It looked great on the model:

I figured that it would take another day or so to complete the designs in the color section on his body. After all, the designs are just doodling - most of the precise work was done. 

Oh, how wrong I was...

Fall Directed Study - Week 1

Well, I'm in the home stretch: the first week of my final semester has passed (and, boy, do I have a lot of work still to do...).

On a very positive note: I finished my Juggler! Finally! It only took about 8 times longer than I thought it would...

I learned a lot creating this model; it was much more complex than anything I've ever modeled before. When I planned my thesis schedule I'd only ever made character models that were one to ten pieces depending on whether they had mechanical parts or clothing or just one solid body. I'd never made anything composed of 60 different objects, many of which are made up of multiple pieces themselves. I had no idea of the scope of what I was taking on when I signed up for this, but I am thoroughly pleased with the results.

I actually had a lot of technical difficulties while on my vacation, so the vast majority of the final work on this model was done after I returned home. I had quite a bit of trouble baking out usable normal maps of all of my ZBrush sculpting on the more organic objects, but I eventually figured out how to remedy that by compositing multiple maps of the same object baked with different envelope sizes together and using healing brushes in Photoshop. I spent a lot of time baking those maps in Maya and more time compositing them, but eventually I was able to move on and bring everything into Modo, which was where my real trouble began.

I had too many textures. Too many normal maps, too many color maps, too many reflections to be calculated on too many different pieces: Modo didn't want to handle my scene. The real-time render preview kept freezing and crashing the program. I eventually figured out a way to work in which I hid the textures on every object except the limb or even just the individual piece that I was working on; then I was able to make some progress.

I gave all of my final objects the appropriate metal textures (many of which I had only to duplicate from other pieces which I had already designated to have the same material), then I began trying to tone down the uber-shiny metal look. It took a lot of trial and error, but eventually I came up with a combination of noise and gradient masks that made the metal look a little less perfect than it started out to be. I then applied variations of these masks to each and every one of the well over 100 different textures that I have applied to the model. It was a time-consuming process, but well worth it; everything still looks metallic to me, but like metal that's spent a little time out in the world, not like a shiny new penny hot off the press:

Some of the noise masks in the above images are still a bit extreme - you can tell that they're noise rather than grime - but I toned them down after seeing these renders. I haven't made new renders yet because it's a bit more of an ordeal to go through to set the renders up than I'd like to deal with right now. I have to open the file in the "modeling" tab which doesn't have the render preview screen built in, turn off all of the textures (which I've put into groups by body area to make the process easier), switch to the "render" tab and position my camera in the render preview window, switch back to the modeling tab, and then go straight to the final "render" from the drop-down menu without seeing the textured preview first. Then, if I need to change views I turn all the textures off and do it all again. It's the only way it works. My computer is good, but it doesn't contain enough ram to let Modo calculate this textured model moving in the preview render screen. I've just got too much going on in it. The final renders, however, calculate much faster than I expected them to given how much trouble I'm having with the preview renders.

Overall, I'm happy with my Juggler. There are still a few things about her that I would like to tweak: I'd like to add some bump maps of etched designs on quite a few of the objects that make her up. I might change a few colors around. I don't think her head is holding its normal map quite as well as I would like: she lost a little bit of volume from what's there in my actual ZBrush sculpt. The apron has a similar problem: I sculpted wrinkles in the fabric that just aren't showing up as much as I'd like with that pink metal texture. I think that my "grime" masks made her just the tiniest bit too dark for what I'd prefer... But these are little things. I think it's important for me to move on now and finish the rest of my thesis. If I can come back and fix them later after I finish the rest: fantastic, but I can't deal with it now. She's 95% to where I want her to be; it's time to call it "good enough" and bring the rest of my project to completion. I could have as long as a month left in the semester after I present my thesis project - I can tweak the little things then.

So, I've moved on to my Addict. This is the state that I left him in back in the spring:

I kept having trouble with the holes in his sleeves. I thought that I could just hollow out the distance between his arm and his inner sleeve in ZBrush, but I hadn't really made the topology to support the right shapes for that. Looking back at it earlier this week I decided it was no good: I had to re-do it. With all of the experience that I gained from the Juggler I looked at this model and saw numerous areas where I was going to have major issues baking out normal maps, even if I managed to fight the topology and sculpt the right shapes in ZBrush. The thing is, I shouldn't have to be fighting the topology: it should be flowing with my sculpting, and the more that I studied this model the more that I knew that wouldn't be the case. So, I went back to my most recent version of him in Maya and re-made his arms. And his toes. And tweaked his hands and his shoulder pads. And fiddled with a few other issues that I found. Then I divided him into the appropriate groups once more and brought him back into ZBrush where I blocked in his sculpting again. This is his current state:

As you may be able to tell, I made each of his sleeves below the elbow into separate pieces from the rest of the body and built the holes into the mesh: it seemed the only way to get it to work properly. I also gave him real, individual toes rather than one solid block to be sculpted into toes. I'm a bit concerned that the model that I modified was not actually my most recent base mesh of the character, but it was the latest one that I found a file for. I'm concerned because the posture differs slightly from the version that I was sculpting before, and there was a row of unmerged vertices in an area that I hadn't modified that instantly separated when I brought the revised mesh back into ZBrush. I took it back into Maya and fixed it, obviously, but I keep wondering what else is different between the two meshes. Were there problems with the mesh that I made modifications to that had been fixed on the version that I'd previously been working on in ZBrush? I've already noticed quite a difference in the shape of the eyes between the two meshes, and am not sure if that's something that I'd fixed in the base mesh in Maya or simply by utilizing the move brush in ZBrush on the first model. I'm going to try refining the eye shape of the new model in ZBrush, but I'm concerned that I'll get into sculpting it and then notice something big enough to cause me to have to go back to revise the base mesh again...

I'm going to progress on the theory that that's not the case, however, and hope that I can just move on from here and get this character sculpted and begun texturing within the week. I don't see anything particularly wrong with the mesh, just things that are different from the previous version, and I know that I tweaked the previous version quite a bit to get the posture right, so it concerns me if that work failed to follow through to the revised character. I think it's ok though: from what I can see now he still looks right to me, so I'm going to continue sculpting him and just make sure that I keep a close eye on his overall shape. Hopefully, when I post in another week, he'll be nearly done.

Summer Directed Study - Weeks 6 + 1/2

I'm getting this update posted quite late this week, so I'm including three Directed Study sessions in this report rather than the usual two.

Directed Study - Session 11

My Gecko is now COMPLETELY finished as far as my thesis work on him is concerned. I would still like to see him textured one of these days, but, as that's not part of my thesis, that will not happen for awhile.

I am quite happy with him. :)

I spent quite a bit of time baking the normal maps for his multitude of pieces, which combined thus:

 I bumped up the contrast just a bit for these images so that they were more visible, but this is the gist of the surface detail on the Gecko (top) and the base (bottom).

Then when I imported all of the maps and OBJs into Modo I decided to do some quick tests to see if I could texture him satisfactorily solely with Modo shaders. I assigned the various pieces of him to material groups that would coincide with the divisions between the Gecko's final colors and did a test render with metallic materials of my own creation:

It looks ok, but I'm not entirely thrilled with it. I wanted a lot more tonal variation in the colors of the metal: a kind of mottled effect. So I did some extremely quick painting over the UV snapshot and threw the resulting map on a shader in Maya just to see how the textures would sit on the panels and if you could see seams or not, and this is what I got:

That mottling on the blue is exactly the kind of coloring that I want. The material and rendering are obviously not at all accurate in this image, but, comparing it to the image with the flat colors that I rendered out of Modo, this is more like what I had in mind when I drew my character design.

Even the short amount of time that I spent setting these texture tests up, however, reminded me that I did not have enough time to spare for perfecting this. Thus, I resorted to focusing on getting the flat shaded and wireframe versions of the Gecko to look satisfactory. I adjusted materials to get a surface that I liked, made wireframe texture guides out of the UV snapshots that I'd taken of the Gecko and his base, which I applied as both diffuse and specular color in the Gecko's "wireframe" material group, set up some three point lighting, animated a three-sixty turn, and viola! I produced both this turntable and the first images that you saw above:

Then I moved on to my Juggler model.

Directed Study - Sessions 12 & 13

 As with Sessions 9 and 10, there's really no clear division between my thesis progress between sessions 12 and 13, so I'm just going to combine them together here.

The first thing that I did after completing my Gecko was to create a few more normal maps for surface details on my Juggler. I made a map for embossed measurements on the surface of the baby bottle:

I made a map for amounts on the measuring spoons:

I made a map to denote "number 2" on the pencil:

And, I made a "mud-splatter" map for the tire. Upon closer inspection of this render, I think that the splatters that I meant to be embossed on the surface are actually receding into it for some reason. I'll have to fix that:

Then I started ZBrush sculpting.

I began with the mop, turning it into an actual mop rather than a vaguely foot-like shape. Once I began sculpting, I realized that while the topology that I had originally created would flow well for a general foot-shaped object, it didn't work well for something that had to be divided into sections as clearly as the mop strings did. The geometry was twisting/pulling oddly along a couple of the sides. The only way to fix it was to retopologize the thing. So, I retopologized it in ZBrush and then re-projected the detail that I'd sculpted back onto it. Then I moved on to sculpting the pin cushion, the finger puppet glove, and the feather duster:

The sculpting on the pin cushion was pretty simple. I gave the body of it a few stitches and softened the top a bit so that it might look a bit like felt. The feather duster was similarly simple: I just drew a bunch of raised lines and then pinched them where necessary to give it a feathery type of texture.

The glove, on the other hand, has proven to be quite difficult. It was simple enough to sculpt, if somewhat time-consuming. When it came time to bake out the normal map though... Let's just say it didn't go well. I had to keep increasing and decreasing the envelope to get various bits and pieces of it. I made a stitch-pattern normal map in Photoshop and xNormal which I overlayed onto the normal maps that I had been able to composite together from bits and pieces of the different maps that I'd rendered, and then realized once I got it on the model that some of the glove's UVs had stretched in the sculpting, as you may be able to see in the image below (it's most noticeable near the "necks" of the characters in this image: in the stitching just below the heads of all of the characters but the dog):

Because of the stretching I was forced to relax and unfold some of the UVs again, which moved them and made all of the normal map work that I'd already done irrelevant. I ended up altering the geometry of the base mesh a bit so that it would hold some of the sculpted elements better, fixing the UVs, projecting the sculpted detail onto the new mesh,  and resculpting about 80% of the detail anyway because every finger had areas that had been pinched in the original sculpting that didn't project well and required multi-level smoothing which then erased sculpted details. Many of the details also projected a little less sharply than I desired, so I had to go through and refine all of them, even where I hadn't had to smooth things... Suffice it to say that it was tedious and dull and repetitive and I haven't attemptted to bake a new normal map for that piece again since I (hopefully) fixed the problems.

I managed to bake satisfactory normal maps for the mop and the feather duster and bring them into Modo; then I rendered just a couple of images of how far the Modo version of the model has come up to this point:

Now I intend to move on to sculpting the face of the Juggler. I'll post the results of my efforts in a few days.